Whenever I read one of his PR statements, I think "nobody can be THAT incompetent or THAT dumb". I mean .... come on. He is totally closing down a multi-million dollar exchange and it takes like 8 hours for THAT message to appear in THAT form? That is very hard to believe. Thus, can it be on purpose? But with what intention? Getting the worst reputation on the planet? Or make everybody think that there must be something unbelievably secret going on, because nobody can possibly be that dumb? I don't get it.

Last time difficulty was adjusted, we saw a sharp increase. Next time, it will probably decrease, right? Could that trend continue? Maybe some people switched off their miners right now (difficulty too high) and will switch it on after the next decrease. If this trend builds up, the low difficulty phases would eventually become very short, and BTC generation would depend mainly on chance. After these short periods, where everybody turned on their miners, periods with very high difficulty would follow where it is more or less unprofitable to mine.

Just some random scenario that came to my mind.

This is a marvelous thread. Your idea made me lough out loudly when it came to the actual toe part.
Seriously, I think this is a very important topic. I am relatively new to Bitcoin (maybe one month), and I am both fascinated and appalled by the whole idea. Obviously in contrast to most people here, I believe "fair" initial distribution is of utter importance for a new currency. Actually, I think it is the most important property (if not the only important property) of a new currency. If one random person or a random group of people started to create their own currency from scratch, and tried to pay for goods with this currency, nobody would ever accept it.
One way is to have a central, trusted authority handing out the money. Another way that would have never crossed my mind is the bitcoin idea (CPU power, now GPU power). This is more "fair" than anything I would have come up with, this is the fascinating side.
Also obviously in contrast to most people here, I still believe the initial bitcoin distribution is nevertheless pretty unfair. It is ok for early adopters to have some small advantage, but if the whole thing works out, they will probably be millionairs soon. The question is however whether the system is fair enough to succeed anyway. Current money is not at all distributed "fairly", and it might well be that bitcoin commerce just keeps growing despite of the unfair initial distribution. Still, it will be difficult to explain to newcomers. The totally unfair distribution of current money is well settled in the heads, and a new currency favouring nerdiness instead of provenance has to be legitimated.
Thus, I believe the bitcoin system is unfair, but maybe not more than other currencies.
I believe there might be better solutions using a "web of trust" and a Ripple-like approach (as suggested by jav), but I have no clear idea yet. As soon as I have a clear idea, I will obviously start my own monetary system 
What actually made me turn off the expensive GPU I just purchased solely to mine bitcoins after only 100 BTC is the ecological aspect. It is totally against my ideal to blow CO2 into the atmosphere like a madman only to solve equations that actually nobody needs to be solved. As far as I understand, the stability and security of the system relies on an ever increasing amount of computing power spent.
Not sure if I will ever turn it on again ...

Ooops. Now that's embarassing. I am reading this stuff now for 2 days and somehow I got the impression that your miner is a mining pool client. No clue how I got to this conclusion. Thanks for getting me straight ;-)
I prefer solo mining anyway, I will send you a donation for the first block I solved (if that ever happens).

Best regards

Yes, me (since 1 day). Do you use the option -f1 ? I first tried with higher numbers to keep my desktop reactive, but got only something like 10000 as well. Now I am at 330000 (as expected).

Can anybody enlighten me when I will get my first bitcoins, and how? Are they just appearing? Is there a message in the console when I resolve a block?

I have it now running for 20 hours with 330 Mhash/s, no bitcoins. I couldn't find any wiki page where it is explained how and when the bitcoins are divided up between members of the mining pool, nor whether the author keeps some percentage for providing the Miner.
 
Could anybody give me some link?

Best regards